“Barclays’ Mark Moskowitz and his team recently parsed the results of the firm’s latest Wireless Subscriber Survey, conducted in the second half of July, which drew respondents from the U.S., China, U.K. and Germany,” Teresa Rivas reports for Barron’s.

“Not surprisingly to anyone with an older smartphone, the survey found that battery life is the No. 1 reason consumers decide to upgrade, while virtual and augmented reality ranked quite low, even though they’ve grabbed headlines,” Rivas reports. “Moskowtiz warns that this means investor optimism around Apple’s efforts to build an AR/VR ecosystem could be overdone, which he likes to the AI bandwagon for IBM last year.”

MacDailyNews Take: Wrong. The average Joe or Jane today doesn’t know augmented reality from their elbow. When they see practical applications of AR on iPhone, they’ll understand and they’ll want it very badly.

Rivas reports, “He writes that there are also some mixed data points to the upside potential for the new iPhone: ‘iPhone is the lead beneficiary of potential switchers, and the iPhone users in the survey sample exhibit stronger purchasing power. As for sensitivity to larger ASPs, though, only 11% of total survey respondents indicated they are willing to pay more than $1,000 for a next-gen smartphone, but 18% of iPhone users are willing to pay more than $1,000. That last figure is still lower than the 30-35% figure that investors are targeting for sales mix related to a new higher-priced iPhone introduced later this year.'”

MacDailyNews Take: Wait until the next-gen iPhones are unveiled and the features are laid out for all the world to see. Then you’ll really see who’s willing to pay and how much they’ll be willing to pay.

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16 Comments

Bigger battery, bigger battery, bigger battery. Without power the phone is a brick. I’m so tired of worrying constantly about when I need to find more power. Apple, at least give us an option, please. The iPhone Atkins (fatter and with 50% larger battery) would be something I’d snap up over any other options.
Stop with the skinny obsession and give us bigger batteries!

I don’t know about a bigger battery but Apple certainly needs to pursue more efficient batteries that offer longer life and quicker charging. Apple should acquire a company devoted to improving batteries and I mean really high-tech batteries even if they require some costly rare elements.

The tech is there, it’s just very expensive and not practical for 100-million production runs of iPhones. We’ll see what the iPhone 8 has to offer, the screen and software will probably go further than any battery tech they’ve come up with.

I’d really love to be able to make and receive CLEAR telephone calls on my iPhone. I’m so weary of horrible connections despite living in an urban environment with plenty of cell towers. The quality of calls is still FAR behind the quality of the last landline I got rid of in 2005. It has gotten so bad that I’ve been thinking of getting a landline again.

The bandwidth on a cell signal is dramatically less than a land line. I’m in the fortunate position that I can simple refuse to take business calls from cell phones. Want to talk to me for more than ten seconds? Call me when you are at a real phone.

I’d be happy with (as others have noted) longer battery life (have a 8 month old iPhone 7+ and, yes, it does need better battery life), and the a Apple Map app that can do multi-point routing for me. So I can, you know, actually PLAN a trip beyond just routing and going from point A to point B, stopping & then having to route and then go from point B to Point C, stopping… etc., etc.

This sort of thing is so out of touch with reality, if you asked cart owners in 1900 if they needed a motorised vehical there would have been few takers simply because they could not comprehend what the advantages would be to them. For a so called expert/analyst to be so out of touch is beyond comprehension as its their job to understand the nature of such trends.

It’s probably as reliable as my own test bed this very day where the only person I have heard talk about upgrading their phone in months was saying how he is waiting to upgrade to the iPhone 8 even though he may have to buy himself out of his present contract. So that’s 100% then.